Impress with Shape and Picture Effects

PowerPoint, Word, and Excel had striking picture and shape effects for years now, so it’s not surprising that it was the number one request for the new Publisher. Customers wanted to create business collateral – like business cards and brochures – that matched the look of content coming from the other applications, as well as, use these effects to spruce up their personal publications. With that in mind, we set out to bring the effects to a new home and here are the results:

Four new types of shape and pictures effects plus a re-polishing of our existing shadow and 3D rotation! Outside the context of a publication, it’s hard to tell how these compare to the old version of Publisher. Let’s examine a cookbook cover I made in Publisher 2010 with the older effects:

If you look closely, you’ll see that the right and bottom edge of each picture have a grey bar running outside the black border. That was our default shadow in Publisher 2010. You could change the color or shift the shadow around behind the picture, but you couldn’t achieve the nice realistic shadows found in the other applications. Here is the same publication in the new Publisher:

The result is a subtle, soft shadow that makes the pictures look like they are floating above the page! The six effects can be applied in any combination, so that you can customize the appearance of your publication anyway you want!

Not sure where to start? You can find these effects conveniently located on the Drawing Tools tab when you have a shape selected or on the Picture Tools tab when you have a picture selected. Each effect comes with a gallery full of pre-made options for you to try out, and you can preview the impact the effect will have on your publication by hovering your mouse over an item in the gallery.

We also included a completely new set of picture styles. These styles use different combinations of the six effect types to speed up the process of updating the look of your pictures.

The new effects offer beautiful new options to ensure that you’ll find the right look for all of your publications. Try using some of our built-in options or experiment with some of your own creations!